Paris Catacombs: The Empire of Bones, Mushrooms, and Crime

Beneath the gaslit streets of nineteenth-century Paris, beneath the clatter of carriages over cobblestones and the cries of marchands ambulants, lay another city altogether — silent, cold, and made entirely of bones. The Paris catacombs were not ancient in the way visitors sometimes imagined: they were a creation of modernity, a bureaucratic solution to a very modern kind of crisis. And yet, once made, they took on a life — or rather, an afterlife — entirely their own. A City Built on Its Own Quarries . The story begins long before the bones. Paris, that most limestone-intensive of cities, had been excavating its own foundations since the Middle Ages. The Louvre, Notre-Dame, the great Haussmann apartment blocks with their characteristic grey-beige facades — all were hewn from the same Lutetian limestone quarried from beneath the Left Bank. By the eighteenth century, the tunnels left behind extended under the city for some 300 kilometres (about 200 miles), an underground labyrinth…